What Things Are Not Department: Freeing Sex from Sin in A. Niphus, 1549

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 652 Blog Bookstore

I suppose that one could write about virtually anything in
terms of what that subject is not:everything
that is tangibly matter or energy could be something else, and everything not
(like shadows and thought) are the stuff of being what they are and aren’t at
the same time.

In 1549 Augustinus Niphus wrote a beautiful, not-so-little
work on the subjects of beauty and love. Niphus (or Agostino Nifo,
or Niphus Suessanus, or Niphus and sometimesNyphus) was born in the Kingdom of Naples

around 1473, and was around 55 or so when he died in
1538-1540.He was a philosopher and
historian of medicine in the high-Renaissance sense, was a great Aristotlean
and Averroist, and proved to be an able
antagonist to the Christian churches on the subject of the blessed
interpretations of millennially-dead Aristotle.There are some who claim that Niphus was a little incoherent on the
subject of Aristotle because, well, he taught the corpus aristotlelicum at university—but Aristotle at this point in the
Renaissance was incredibly deeply ingrained in the curricula of all
universities all across Europe, and was opne of the great basics of education. There
was no escape.

But back to love.Niphus’ Libri duo, de pulchero liber primus, de amore liber secundus was a
277-page work printed at Lyon (Latinized as “Lugduni”) by the Berigens.The publishers also provided Niphuis with a
beautiful title-page device showing the joing on hands under the watchful eyes
of Christ, a love signified with an emblem announcing “bona fide”.The book was about beauty (“pulchero”) and
love (“amore”).The first part of the
two books deals with all levels of beauty and shows derivations on the subject
from the most ancient philosophers./The
second part, on love, begins innocently enough on the philosophical and moral
aspects of the emotion and institution, but then goes further, treating love in
all of its aspects, including psychological and physical.It is an enormously full treatment of the physiological
side of sex, which was something that just wasn’t often encountered at this time.

The main contribution of
Niphus on love/sex was this—humans have a certain psychological and physiological
disposition to sex, and how sex could not be considered sinful.Not content with controlling the poor
believing people’s thoughts with fear of eternal damnation, the church reached
right into the very bedroom, specifying that sex was sinful, an abomination,
dirty, laced with the potential of Satan himself, if not used for the purposes
of procreation.All other fruit was
forbidden under dire threat of the Lake of Fire.(And still
is:driving to the bagel store
yesterday, Sunday morning, I tuned the radio to one of the preaching shows—an easy
thing to do and sort of hard-to-miss on Sundays as I live in the Bible belt—and
someone was railing away at “Satan’s fornicators”, which was “the basis of the
Original Sin”, and on and on.I don’t
know how he got to the Original Sin part because the bagel shop is only a
5-minute drive.) So the case made by Niphus was not popular in the minds of the
social controllers—who knows what structurally-threatening powers might be
unleashed in the libidinously un-hellish enjoyments of two people?

I found this illustration in an old E.P. Goldschmidt (bookseller) catalog, and the old bookseller recognized the medical value of the work and wondered aloud why it hasn't turned up in the major medical book collections. I wonder about that, too. Be that as it may, Niphus should really show up as one of the great educators on the function of sex, and to physiologically and psychologically announce that sex was not the sin the church would have you believe it was. Perhaps in a way, too, Niphus was among the earliest of those to release woman from thousands of years of blame as the proprietesse of selfish Satanic fornication--at least with Niphus, if sex were to be insisted upon as being a sin, there is the possibility of having two actors in the process, rather than having woman carry the blame for the entirety of the sin.